Chuck Jones did it one way. Bob Clampett did it another.
Both directors (and Friz Freleng) employed smears to move characters from one frame to another. Jones’ animators, guys like Bobe Cannon and Lloyd Vaughn, stretched a character like a balloon. Clampett’s animators seem to have preferred brush lines, which also indicate speed.
Here are two examples from “An Itch in Time” (1943). Five drawings from pose-to-pose, less than a half second.
Somewhere in a 1943 U.S. government copyright catalogue may exist the original credits for this cartoon. But the Blue Ribbon release that everyone has seen has shorn them. The credited animator is unknown.
There’s nothing more amusing and satisfying to fans of a TV series to find a hateful reviewer fall flat on their butt when the show they despise becomes a runaway hit, and remains one for years.
Such was the case with “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
The Clampett clan loaded up their truck and drove onto prime time 50 years ago today. The result? The number one show in television for the 1962-63 season. And it got bigger numbers the following year.
The Amarillo News-Reporter bleated: “The Beverly Hillbillies, new tonight, just may be the worst television show ever filmed. It purports to be comedy, but it trots out all the most ancient hillbilly jokes ever told.”
I love “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I watched it in prime-time (with the Kellogg’s cereal boxes in the lower corner of the screen in the closing credits, like on so many shows then) and ate it up in reruns. The series is a little uncomfortable in the first episodes but executive producer Paul Henning seems to have realised what was amiss and fixed it quickly. In the initial few shows, Jed and his clan are the joke. The humour is based on how stupid they are. Henning must have realised you can’t have staying power with all your protagonists being dullards. So the focus was changed. While the Hillbillies remained a little ignorant about modern life, they became underdogs. The city folk became the ones ridiculed on the show—the snobby woman next door, the pathetically avaricious banker, and various shysters who tried to take advantage of them only to be foiled. They were the kinds of people the audience loved to hate and they could identify with the Clampetts. There was balance in the best scripts. Granny (and, for a few episodes, Sonny Drysdale) provided comic relief. There were warm moments (mainly involving Ellie May) and bits of parody (the double-nought spy episodes) and satire (Dash Riprock and the film industry), though not the vicious satire of Al Kapp’s “Li’l Abner,” which the show was compared to in many early reviews due to the superficial similarity in character types. The show was probably the first exposure many people had to bluegrass music. Curt Massey’s theme was, as hit themes generally are, singable, and veteran guitarist Perry Botkin, Sr. provided some fitting and memorable incidental music. And the show hired fine character actors for various occasional or one-shot roles, including cartoon voice actors Alan Reed, John Stephenson, Elvia Allman and, of course, Bea Benaderet as Cousin Pearl.
But some people shore ‘nuff done reckoned that thar show was smellier than a passel of skunks in an outhouse. Here’s the review the day after the premiere in the Lowell Sun, complete with grammatically-incorrect opening sentence.
Hillbillies Series Seen As Insult By William K. Sarmento LOWELL—I am well aware that the master-minds at the television networks must try and please a variety of tastes. But last night’s premiere of “The Beverly Hillbillies” was insult to the intelligence of the most moronic viewer. It tops the list of the worst show to come along this season. It was so bad that I almost thought I could hear the windows in millions of American homes flying open to air out the living room to get rid of all traces of this “bomb.” The show is a cross between “The Real McCoys” and “L’il Abner.” The result of this integration comes on strong, like an inventory at the Chicago stockyards. The basic premise for this “gem” is that a backwoods hillbilly family becomes millionaires overnight due to the discovery of oil in their backyard. They decide to move to Beverly Hills to be near their kinfolk, other millionaires.
The oldest member of the family is a sort of Mammy Yokem who stamps out the fireplace with her bare feet to save her shoe leather. Her son is the male head of the group who has never heard or a telephone, airplane or a millionaire. But he docs drive the family across country to California without incident. Now isn’t he the brightest thing since the Hathaways left with their chimp children?
NEXT there is Cousin Jethro, who looks strangely like L’il Abner. He has had some “schooling” and demonstrated this by his answer to the question, “How come they don’t have ice and snow in California?” Cousin Jethro beamingly replied, “Don’t ask me, I didn’t take it.” Now I can understand why Kennedy has so much trouble getting a federal aid to education bill passed. If this is a tribute to the American intellect, then we bad all better hammer a few more nails into the fallout shelter.
Perhaps you may he considering that this was the initial show and it’s bound to get better. Let me clue you that in future weeks we will he treated to such comedy as the Hillbillies attempting to do their washing in the swimming pool in back of their new mansion. Aren’t you weak with anticipation?
The one consoling thing with which I may leave you is that next week you may watch the new Gene Kelly series, “Going My Way” or the return of Perry Como. Maybe if we are all quiet and don’t say anything “The Beverly Hillbillies” will pack up and leave. I doubt if the rating charts will indicate that the public has turned out the welcome mat for them.
Does anyone even remember Gene Kelly doing a TV series?
Not all the reviews were negative. Let’s look at three from various news services.
By CYNTHIA LOWRY AP Television-Radio Writer NEW YORK (AP)—The title “Beverly Hillbillies” explains a lot about CBS’ new comedy series and, happily, the premiere Wednesday night promises a funny, rowdy and maybe even mildly satiric program. The jokes will be based, of course, on the sudden shift of a primitive Ozark family — one of those moonshinin’, hawg-raisin,’ possum-eatin’ clans found primarily in a writer’s imagination—from a remote mountain shack to a Southern California millionaire’s mansion, courtesy of an overnight oil fortune. The Clampett family consists of pretty familiar characters of fiction and comic strips: Jed, the colorful talking father (played by Buddy Ebsen); Granny, who considers tending the family still “woman’s work”; Elly May, the lissome daughter whose first name should be Daisy; and cousin Jethro, the handsome bumpkin whose name might be Abner. Anyway, it promises to be uninhibited and amusing if the writers remember to add enough branch water to the corn.
‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ Looks Like Smash Comedy Hit By RICK Du BROW HOLLYWOOD, Sept. 27. (UPI)—At the networks there is a strong feeling that “The Beverly Hillbillies,” a new comedy series which showed up last night on CBS-TV, is going to be a smash hit. The title describes the idea in a nutshell: It is about an Ozark Mountain family that discovers oil in front of its shack and moves to a huge mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif., home of money and movie stars. The series stars Buddy Ebsen as family patriarch; as his voluptuous blonde daughter Irene Ryan as “granny;” and Max Baer Jr., son of the former heavyweight boxer, as a big, good-natured, oafish cousin named Jethro. Needless to say, the advertising boys are thrilled about the possibilities of the series because it reminds them of “The Real McCoys;” and nothing thrills an advertiser more than a show that is reminiscent of another hit. SO MUCH FOR THE preliminaries. As a flat observation, the nicest thing I can say about “The Beverly Hillbillies” — or any program, for that matter—is that it is really not like civilized rural clan; these new hillbillies make Li’l Abner and his mob look like a bunch of sophisticates. Samples: —Miss Douglas, carrying an unconscious, citified oilman into the shack, asks Ebsen: “Can I keep him, Pa?” —Ebsen, who doesn’t know the value of oil until he’s told about it, and doesn’t realize he’s a rich man, tells a cousin he’s been offered “a new kind of dollars . . . million.” WELL, ALL RIGHT. This is a cold - blooded commercial series to cash in on some salable types, but there's nothing done; and many times, it was. For example, the rollicking banjo music that weaves in and out is delightful. The cast is expert and attractive. The writer - creator, Paul Henning who penned comedy for George Bums and Gracie Allen for a decade, knows his business. Thus, while things sometimes seem forced on “Hillbillies,” it also often fast and funny and fairly acceptable broad farce, though I wouldn’t advise you to call off a good poker game because of it. To succeed, the “Hillbillies” must compete against tough shows: Perry Como and the new “Going My Way” series with Gene Kelly.
‘Beverly Hillbillies’ Keeps Main Characters In Line By HAL HUMPHREY [Los Angeles Times syndicate] HOLLYWOOD — Taking a family of hillbillies out of their primitive Ozark shack and plunking them down to live in the middle of Beverly Hills sounds like the corniest gimmick to come down the pike since “Truth or Consequences.” The nice thing about this brand of corn, however, is creator Paul Henning’s refusal to let his characters become wise-cracking, knee-slapping comics. In the premiere episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies” on CBS-TV), Cousin Pearl (Bea Benadaret) is trying to convince Jed Clampett (Buddy Ebsen) that since he now is oil-rich, he can leave his remote Ozark existence for the comforts of “Californy.” JED: You think I oughta move? PEARL: Jed, how can you even ask? Look around you! You’re eight miles from the nearest neighbor. You're overrun with skunks, possums, coyotes and bobcats. You got kerosene lamps for light, a wood stove to cook on winter and summer. You’re washin’ with homemade lye soap and your bathroom is 50 feet from the house. And you ask should you move! JED (very soberly): Yeah — I guess you’re right. A man’d be a dang fool to leave all this. LATER IN THE half hour when the time came for Jed, Granny, Elly and Big Jethro to take off for Californy in their modified flatbed truck, I found myself sharing Jed’s doubts about the advantages of a Beverly Hills manse over his crude but homey Ozark hovel. Fans of Jackie Gleason’s “Honeymooners” used to complain once in a while over the absolutely stark, and maybe even dirty, tenement flat they occupied. To me, that two-plate gas burner, the rickety ice-box and the flimsy commode actually set off Ralph and Alice Kramden’s frustrating, but funny (for the audience), scramble to carve out a little real living on a bus driver’s pay. WRITER-PRODUCER Henning feels he is furnishing himself with more comedy springboards by surrounding his hillbillies with the posh accoutrements which come with a Beverly Hills estate, and he probably is right. Someday, though, I hope he will do a season of shows with his hill folk in their natural habitat. Al Capp has done right well with Li’l Abner in that milieu. It's been a few years since Henning has done TV. He wrote for George Burns and Gracie for 10 years, produced and wrote Dennis Day’s TV show the year it was opposite “I Love Lucy,” then came up with the Bob Cummings Show — the successful one which had Bob as a semi-lecherous photographer for five years. After a spate of movie-writing, Henning — a slight man who is as serious about his work as any bank vice-president — decided TV audiences were ready again “to just laugh.” HIS OWN BEGINNINGS were in Independence, Mo., and it was Boy Scout treks into the Ozarks which Henning says inspired his long-standing desire to do something about hillbillies. “They never think they do anything funny, and that’s the way I'm keeping them in the series,” says Henning. He wrote the first 11 episodes himself, and even the theme music and lyrics (“The Ballad of Jed Clampett”) to make sure that his hillbillies weren’t corrupted. Henning insists on supervising the publicity, so that his actors' images in the show aren’t cheapened and distorted. “Somebody thought it would be a good idea to do a magazine layout of pictures with Buddy Ebsen on his small yacht," Henning recalls. “I screamed. It was too out of character for the series, and the people I know in the mid-West take their TV characters very seriously.” HE WAS EVEN more upset when he saw that in the first episode Elly (Donna Douglas) was too neatly coiffeured and eye-pencilled. “I was ill that day, and didn’t get to the set, but later I felt like killing that hairdresser.”
The show probably lasted a season too long. Much like Mr. Magoo wore out his welcome by continually mistaking things for something else, the final “Hillbillies” season made Granny the butt of the joke by mistaking grunion for… well, my mind has blocked whatever it was. The continuing storyline didn’t help. But the show was fun while at the top of its game.
One of the things I didn’t learn until years after the series left prime-time was that Irene Ryan wasn’t a little old lady. Nor did I realise she was part of the vaudeville team of Tim Ryan and Irene Noblette. They were, among other things, stars of a series of short films for Educational (“The Spice of the Program”) in the mid-‘30s and Jack Benny’s summer replacement on radio in 1936. She later appeared as a regular on Bob Hope’s radio show and if you listen closely to the old broadcasts, you can recognise the voice. Dennis Day once told a story about how he was travelling to Los Angeles from New York to audition for the Benny show. He’d never been west before. His mother recognised Tim and Irene making the same trip and asked them to look after him.
Here she is in the 1944 film “Hot Rhythm,” courtesy of a camera-phone pointed at a TV.
A P.S.—Justin Ebsen posted this note on Facebook: “Okay, now a fun fact: Dad (Jed) was almost killed when in the episode where Jethro becomes a secret agent, he tries to make the Hillbilly truck fly. It was running up on some scaffolding and began to fall when Max Baer Jr. grabbed my dad and pulled him to safety.”
How surprised is Woody at seeing a lion walk toward him? His head becomes a red smear.
The smear moves back for a couple of drawings. Then it develops telescope eyes, and the rest of the bodies catches up to them.
This is from Shamus Culhane’s “Woody Dines Out” (1944). The only credited animator is Don Williams but Mark Kausler reveals in the comments who was responsible for this wonderful scene.
A noise-making child alienates spaghetti-limbed adults and is ostracised only to become a hero to the adults thanks to his noise.
No, it’s not “Gerald McBoing Boing.” It’s yet another UPA cartoon that ploughs the same ground, “Little Boy With a Big Horn.”
As usual, the designs are the stars and they’re by Thornton Hee this time. Let’s look at some of the backgrounds. Jules Engel worked on those. The swirls on the last frame represent fog.
And being directed by Bob Cannon, there has to be abstract geometry in there somewhere. The circles represent sound waves.
Cannon does a couple of things I really like. The opening titles are treated like a slide show at an old-time movie theatre, which nicely fits the era the cartoon is set in. And he symbolises how loud the kid’s tuba-playing is by having the dialogue drop out during part of one scene.
Marian Richman and John T. Smith, not sounding like his gruff characters at Warner Bros., play the parents.
It’s only natural that a blog named for the best character on “The Jetsons” should mention the cartoon series’ 50th birthday today.
“The Jetsons” was an animated catalogue of what people of the post-war era thought the future would look like, based on what they’d read and seen in science magazines, world fairs and even TV ads and paid industrial films. It was an era of consumerism and “The Jetsons” featured amazing products of the future one could buy to make their life easier, most of them based on concepts that had been kicking around. Of course, there was a down side, too. Some of those new-fangled things didn’t work or blew up. George Jetson got caught in traffic jams worse than anyone dealt with in 1962. And he put up with a boss who had never heard the term “anger management.”
The show was one of the first that ABC broadcast in colour, though that wasn’t really much of a selling point. I watched the series in black-and-white until the early ‘70s and I suspect I was no different than a lot of kids back then. It would have been odd growing up and seeing these interior backgrounds in colour. If I had to guess, I’d say they were by Dick Thomas.
“The Jetsons” failed in prime time because of numbers—more people watched “Disney” on NBC. Once reruns moved into kid-time on Saturday mornings, it flourished. Years later, it resulted in the Hanna-Barbera studio’s new owners bringing it back with far less entertaining new episodes and a movie that’s best left forgotten.
During the show’s original run, Joe Barbera was the front-man for pre-premiere newspaper stories. But here’s one published 50 years ago today in the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram that quotes Bill Hanna. Only once. The story sounds as if it’s based on a press release by Arnie Carr’s publicity department.
Bert’s Eye View By BERT RESNIK TV and Radio Editor
George Jetson fed the micro-tablet newspaper into the reading machine and pressed buttons until he got to the sports page.
There was a picture of the coach of the local football team George pressed another button.
“We’ll moider ‘em,” said the voice of the local coach.
George grinned and absent-mindedly flicked a few cigarette ashes on the rug.
An electric-seeing-eye vacuum cleaner came buzzing out of its wall cabinet, sucked up the ashees and discreetly returned to its niche.
George glanced out of the window and noticed the smog. He pressed a button and his Sky Pad Apartment immediately rose 1,000 feet above the smog. AN IMMEDIATE RISE to popular acclaim is hoped for George and the rest of “The Jetsons” by his creators, Hanna-Barbera Productions.
“The Jetsons,” a futuristic cartoon-situation comedy a la “The Flintstones,” makes its debut in Color at 7:30 p.m. today on channel 7.
The Sunday series is about a family living in the year 2062. An average family, it has the ordinary astro-age conveniences available to middle-class families.
There is for example, their nuclear-pellet-powered space car which gets 40,000 miles to the pellet. (Economy cars get 60,000 miles per pellet.)
There is the dog-walk, a treadmill which periodically serves up fire hydrants.
A pneumatic tube is used for transporting the children to and from school.
Occasionally the wrong child is returned, but there’s no major problem. Just simply press a reject button until the right child shows up.
* * *
AN UPCOMING episode will feature an anti-gravity dance floor that permits the dancers to gyrate on the ceiling.
An astro-age rock-and-roller, Jet Screamer, will bellow:
“I know a swinging place out on the edge of space.”
He’ll introduce a new dance, the solo swivel, which may be the successor to the twist.
Hanna-Barbera Productions feel “The Jetsons” are bringing a new twist to television with its comic astro-age outlook.
Those who have been associated with the series—the same professionals involved in the production of “The Flintstones”—think “The Jetsons” should move ahead faster in the ratings than the caveman cartooner.
This would be quite an accomplishment for “The Flintstones” were practically an overnight success.
Bill Hanna shares the enthused optimism about “The Jetsons” but isn’t personally going out on any prediction limb.
“You just can’t say until the guy in front of the tube watches it.” he said.
For the guy in front of the TV tube—even though it isn’t pneumatic—also has a reject button.
And here’s another newspaper piece that reads like filler supplied by Carr’s people.
Questions And Answers On ABC-TV’s ‘The Jetsons’
Who dreams up the futuristic gadgets seen in “The Jetsons”?
Three occupants of the “think room” at Hanna-Barbera Productions devote full time to this project.
What have been some of their best brainstorms?
The Peek-a-boo Prober Pill, a tiny diagnostic device that televises — with commentary —- after it is swallowed by a patient; a miniaturizing machine used by Jetson’s boss to shrink shipments of Spacely Space Sprockets and shipping charges; the fooderacycle [sic] unit that instantly prepares and serves any menu selected from its card index.
How many drawings are used in “The Jetsons”?
More, than 12,000 individual drawings (cells) go into each half-hour segment.
How many man hours does each segment require?
A total of 16,000, including all production departments such as dubbing, recording, lab and musicians.
How did H-B happen to follow up their Stone Age “The Flintstones” with a series set 100 years in the future?
The 2060’s setting was one of the ideas proposed when H-B decided to make their first cartoon series with humans instead of animals. It was rejected in favour of the prehistoric Flintstone setting because the idea seemed “too far out” a couple of years ago.
What is the major difficulty in making “The Jetsons”?
Keeping a hundred years ahead of the present due to the scientific breakthroughs being made.
Is there an example of this?
The long-legged bug shaped Moonwalker now in production for moon exploration. On this Joseph Barbera comments that if one of his artists had submitted such a sketch a couple of years ago, he would have thought he was crazy.
How are futuristic sounds for the series made?
With electronic devices and from a sound effects library containing more than 5000 sounds, from “Snores and Shivers” to “Poofs and Pops.”
“The Jetsons” had a great opening. There’s that jumping theme song by Hoyt Curtin and his band and the memorable close-up shot of Earth from outer space, with overlays of drawings to simulate a 3-D effect.
Suddenly, the sound of drums and horns and the shot cuts to a starry black exosphere with moving geometric shapes in the foreground.
The blue skies and space needle buildings of Orbit City quickly fade in, and then the Jetson family zooms toward the camera twice. We get to meet the family. There’s perspective animation during the opening which Hanna-Barbera almost never used in its cartoons because of the cost.
Elementary schools used to have tall windows like this. About 1910.
What?! Cash? In the future? Those three guys in the “think room” aren’t thinking.
We didn’t have “malls” in the early ‘60s. We had “shopping centres.” So that’s what the Jetsons have.
The name “Tralfaz”, at least as it applies to Astro, was heard in the episode “Millionaire Astro.” This is a scan of a cel from that episode, featuring Tralfaz’s dog house that’s on the masthead of this blog. The colour isn’t quite the same as what you’ll see on the cartoon DVD.
One wonders if Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and their talented artists ever expected “The Jetsons” to last this long. The show’s half-way to 2062, the year its set in. It might just make it there.
Jack Benny’s career as a comedian started while he was in the Navy during World War One, so it’s perhaps appropriate that he would have been among the stars traipsing around entertaining soldiers during World War Two. He did it at camps and bases in North America and, more importantly, overseas.
Jack didn’t have an astounding film career, but he did work with a number of funny and attractive leading ladies. He was also quite the ladies’ man before (and some say after) he settled down with Mary Livingstone. So it seems fitting that Jack should be the one interviewed about soldiers overseas and the ladies they want. Jack’s findings may be surprising.
The following feature story was printed in Every Week Magazine, one of those Sunday newspaper supplements. It’s dated June 11, 1944. The author has an annoying habit of using Jack’s given and surname throughout the story.
Pin-Up Favorites Abroad By Dee Lawrance HOLLYWOOD Women with men overseas should love Jack Benny. Women whose husbands, sweethearts, sons and brothers are on any of the fighting fronts should be very grateful to Jack Benny. Because he’s the first entertainer to visit the boys and come back with a truly encouraging word to the girls back home. Jack Benny feels, and backs up his feeling by having checked every barrack he came near on his travels, that pin-up girls are greatly overrated. If any of you women have ever gazed enviously at a well-turned ankle on a movie starlet; wished you could boast of the same set of curves in the same places; yearned to be as pretty in the picture you are sending your “him”—just forget it. So says Jack Benny, and he’ll oven thump his fist on the table for emphasis. Jack’s not the violent type, so you can see how much he means it when he says: “The real pin-up girls of the American armed forces are the home girls. For every cutie I saw tacked up on barrack walls, pinned inside tents, pasted in planes and ships, I saw at least 20 pictures of the girls they left behind. “By that,” amended Jack Benny, and the laughter lines around his gray eyes crinkled, “I don’t just mean sweethearts, either. In fact, wives—no matter how long a guy has been married —don’t get any competition from the smoothies from Hollywood in a pictorial manner. And kid sisters and mothers are right up there, matching the others in popularity.” When you think of soldiers and pictures, you must never forget the wallets. Returning actors and actresses who have spent any time overseas all remark up on the readiness of G.I. Joe to haul out snapshots to show. In fact, more and more movie stars are sending fan pictures designed to fit in a wallet. “The wallet pictures they carry,” continued Jack Benny, “feature home girls, first and foremost. And here’s a message to all wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts—get as many pictures taken as you can, pictures of yourselves, of the house, of friends, of places and things he knows—and send them to him. “You’ll never know, until you have been there and lived with our boys, just how much your pictures will mean. A snapshot can come in for an awful lot of attention when you’re sitting around waiting to go into action. They mean more than any of us will ever know.” Having settled the hash of the pin-up girls, Jack Benny relented and admitted that there were pin-up pictures to be seen in the camps he had visited. “Mostly,” he qualified, “when the boys haven’t got girls of their own, though. And there you will see Annie Sheridan’s lovely face plastered all over the place. Rita Hayworth is another favorite. So is Maria Montez—the boys like her for the exotic costumes she wears in her films. And Betty Grable, of course.” Speaking of Betty brings up an amusing anecdote from Jack Benny’s trip some months ago which took in Egypt, Nigeria, the Sudan, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Persia, Sicily and South America. “In Brazil,” he said, “I arrived just after the news of Betty Grable’s marriage had reached there. And everywhere I went the soldiers said: “Grable can’t do this to us—a fine thing, that lovely creature going off and getting married! “As a matter of fact, when any of the glamor girls, whether it's Rita, or Betty, or any of them get married, the boys make a great thing of it—and get a lot of fun moaning about their bad luck in losing still another gal to wedded bliss.” Right now, Jack Benny is working on plans for another trip overseas. The popular comedian feels, as do all entertaining personalities who have gone overseas on visits to our forces, that there is nothing now as important. On his last trip, Benny’s troupe was composed of Anna Lee, a songstress named Wini Shaw, and the famous harmonica player, Larry Adler. “The girls,” Jack recalled, “were amazing. Not a whimper out of them at hard conditions, traveling difficulties, strange places to stay. “They took everything like a man and were, on the whole, much less complaining than many a man I have known. Place either of them on a camel, in a jeep, plane, truck or just on their own feet, and they went along beautifully. Don’t ever try to tell me the gals can’t take it. I watched Anna and Wini—and I know!” Just taking it and not making a fuss is only the first requirement of an entertainer in far-off camps and outposts. Just as important, perhaps even more so, is the ability to laugh and talk with the lonely men, to make them laugh and talk with you. QUESTIONS about the home folk—with emphasis on the feminine gender—led all the other questions the boys shot at the visitors from home. “Chiefly, they asked whether they looked as pert and pretty as ever,” Jack Benny went on. “ ‘Do they wear bows in their hair and how short are their skirts, and how about their stockings—are they having a hard time getting them?’ they would ask. “They wanted to know, the ones who had been in longest, how food rationing had affected life at home. Was the rationing of gas a hardship? They showed a tremendous concern for the happiness of the ones they had left behind—and you should have seen the satisfied faces, the smiles, when we assured them the home folks were fine, and behind them 100 per cent.” Anyone who has ever gone on one of those extended trips with an entertaining troupe knows the difficulties and hardships of them They are constantly on the move. Hardly a day passes without miles put behind the troupers, never a day passes without at least two shows. You can’t be a slouch and go on one of these trips. Yet Jack Benny said it was a rest for him. “For 33 years,”he explained, “I have been on the radio. One program a week, performed twice, 52 weeks a year. And for each program you have to write 12 pages of jokes, out of which 15 pages have to be good—or you’re out. “Then there have been movies in between to make. It keeps a guy busy. And so you can see why the tour was a rest —and why I want to be allowed to make another trip as soon as I can.” In a few months he will be seen again—playing an angel. “The Horn Blows at Midnight” might be the title for any sort of picture, particularly a serious one. Yet the fact that it stars Jack Benny guarantees that it will bring a spot of gaiety to a war-torn world.
It’ll probably never be written, but someone should objectively tell the tale of Snowball, the studio set up by Bob Clampett to make Beany and Cecil cartoons in the early ‘60s.
In theory, Snowball could have grown to become another Hanna-Barbera. The studio had some very good talent. But it had an extremely short life-span. Animator Fred Kopietz spoke to historian Mike Barrier about money troubles, assistant editor Pete Verity remembered the almost-impossible deadlines and network meddling. And then there was the matter of timing. Clampett put ‘Beany and Cecil’ on the air in early 1962 during the boom in prime-time animated cartoon shows. But as soon as the first failures sunk in the ratings, networks quickly looked to other kinds of programming.
Here’s a syndicated newspaper feature dated March 4, 1962 where Clampett talks about the show and why he feels other prime-time cartoons failed. Interestingly, Clampett is pretty deprecating about his work at Warners. And if success followed the Beany and Cecil puppet show because he “threw away the script,” it naturally follows that the success was due to the ad-libs—by puppeteers/voice actors Stan Freberg and Daws Butler, meaning Clampett had nothing to do with it.
By CHARLES WITBECK HOLLYWOOD — ABC has ushered in another cartoon series on Saturday nights at 7.00 p. m. entitled “Matty’s Funnies with Beany and Cecil.” * “Matty’s Funnies” used to be a collection of old cartoons. Now it has teamed up with Beany, a little boy with a propeller on his beany, and a friendly, semi-stupid sea serpent called Cecil. As puppets in Los Angeles during the pioneer days of TV, Cecil and Beany were quite the rage. Even grownups got home early to pat their kids on the head and catch the show. Creator Bob Clampett used to throw out scripts and have the puppets talk up for the benefit of the grownups during most of the half hour. The next morning fans called into praise or damn the proceedings, so Clampett knew where he was going. Cecil, a hand puppet with a very mobile cloth face that screwed up in a most engaging way, was a celebrity equal to the Lucky Strike marching cigarettes. While Kukla, Fran and Ollie had the east coast sewed up, Beany and Cecil were LA heroes. The puppets have become cartoon characters and in five minutes initiate heroics that used to take Bob Clampett six weeks to tell. In other words, the chit-chat for grownups has disappeared, this cartoon series is strictly for kids. * And that’s why Clampett, a man who looks like he'd just gotten out of bed, isn’t worried about the series’ success. “ ‘Top Cat,’ ‘Calvin And The Colonel’ (Bob has other names for them) were aimed too high,” he says. Bob is going to ignore the adult class and concentrate on the population explosion of unending youngsters. “We’ll have a whole new audience every year,” he says, meaning an audience range of from six to 11. It can go lower. Clampett’s year and a half old daughter, Baby Ruthie, can sit through five cartoons without wandering, and his five-year-old boy, Bobbie, can say all the names of the Clampett characters. Would Clampett list a few? Bob nodded and pulled out illustrations of Go Man Gogh, a painter with a mobile wrist: Flora the Clinging Vine, a girl-like plant who goes for Cecil; Jack the knife; Normal Norman; Davy Crickett and his leading lady bug; Careless the Mexican Hairless; a lobster called Snapsie Maxie; The Boo Birds; and Lil Homer, a baseball playing octopus who cavorts in the little leagues under the sea. There’s Twinkle Twinkle, the starry-eyed starfish: the town of Los Wages; So What and the Seven What Nots. And that's only the beginning. In case you didn’t get the idea, Mr. Clampett likes names. * The Saturday night show of five minute cartoons is billed as “The cleanest show on TV.” The reason — a Cecil bubble bath will be on the market along with other toys like Dishonest John games and a Cecil jack-in-the-box. The sponsor is a toy maker and he has nine months to capture the Christmas market with his cartoon characters. Clampett has been a cartoonist and gag men since the age of 15. He spent 15 years learning his trade at the Warner Bros, cartoon division. “I was low man on the totem pole over there during the thirties.” he said. “The cartoon division was above a grocery store and I spent most of my money buying bags of cherries.” At noon, young Clampett joined the cartoonists at the drug store counter. “We filled up most of the seats,” he said, “and when a stranger deigned to sit with us. We would put on a little show. The fellas used to burp with great skill, and we often put on a small concert for the stranger, working down the counter from right to left. Few stayed to finish their meal.” During this time Clampett dreamed up “Tweetie” and thought about Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd during working hours. “I tried every gag that came into my head,” said Bob. “Most of them were terrible, but it was the only way to learn.” Clampett used to preview his cartoons in seven Los Angeles theaters and reactions would change from place to place. “Some jokes would be a dud even where and we were forced to take them out,” he said. “I learned to make many changes, but in general I wrote what I thought was funny.”
There was always something disconcerting about the “Beany and Cecil” cartoons to me as a kid and I never could quite pinpoint what it was. In watching them now, I think I know what the problem is. The old theatricals and the Jay Ward cartoons featured wise-cracking protagonists who deservedly got the best of their opponents. Beany was expressionless, creepily so. The Captain played virtually no role in the action. And Cecil was constantly physically and mentally abused, as if sadism is supposed to be funny. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, considering how Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were treated in a few of Clampett’s cartoons. And the stars of the supporting cartoons were lacklustre. Dishonest John was the show’s best character and even he wasn’t as over-the-top as Ward’s Snidely Whiplash, a little ironic considering Clampett was Warner Bros.’ most over-the-top director some 15 years earlier.
Still, I’ll take Beany over ‘Calvin and the Colonel’ any day. You can’t dislike a cartoon series with a jolly version of “Rag Mop.”
